1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of reading the current of microcontroller memory cells.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
Most single memories, which are integrated in a chip housing only the memory, have pins for measuring the current of memory cells. A voltage of roughly 1 V is applied to a pin to measure the current of each cell. Such a method is very useful for checking and engineering the memory.
At present, however, the above method is not applicable to microcontrollers having nonvolatile EPROM or flash-EEPROM memories, because it is generally impossible to provide them with numerous additional pins which would be required, or to perform the cell reading function using the existing pins on the microcontroller, since the pins already perform diverse functions. Moreover, the same memory configuration may be used for designing various differently structured microcontrollers, so that a solution suitable for one is not necessarily suitable for others.